The amount of data available to information seekers has grown astronomically, whether as the result of the proliferation of information sources on the Internet, or because of private efforts to organize business information within a company, or any of a variety of other causes. As the amount of available data grows, so does the need to be able to categorize or organize that data so that the data can be more efficiently searched.
Conventional computer systems require a user to run separate searches to retrieve data objects from Internet services and from the client computer and other local data storage, even if the user utilizes identical searches on the client computer and on Internet services. Consequently, users may have to run multiple searches to locate data objects from various data sources. In addition, the user may forget to search a relevant data source and, therefore, fail to locate pertinent data objects.
People searching for information or desiring compilation of data objects do not have a simple and intuitive way of bringing all these pieces together. Thus, the pieces, in order to be compiled, must be processed though an intensive manual function. For example, if a person is comparative shopping, a spreadsheet or other application must be manually created and the comparisons input manually. This manual compilation is time-consuming and errors can result due to an incorrect entry or due to other problems.